Sins of the Past
by zipadeea
Summary: It's been a never ending fight for years, centuries really. Neither of you can hope to defeat the other because you're so evenly matched. He wins some, and you win some, but they are battles. The war looks as though it will end in a draw. That is, until the day you finally discover his secret. You learn his greatest weakness. You find out his name. Barry Allen.


_AN: Just kind of came to me as I was thinking about the Flash season finale, especially that scene where Barry asks Wells why he killed his mom. These are my thoughts on the musings of Harrison Wells. Hope you enjoy! Please read and review._

It's been a never ending fight for years, centuries really. Neither of you can hope to defeat the other because you're so evenly matched. He wins some, and you win some, but they are battles. The war looks as though it will end in a draw. That is, until the day you finally discover his secret. You learn his greatest weakness. You find out his name.

Barry Allen.

You discover it through a stroke of luck, and know that somewhere, someone must want you to finally end the conflict. Bartholomew Henry Allen, born May 14, 1990, you read. His father was a doctor, his mother a nurse in the same hospital. He was an only child. He studied at Central City University and worked for most of his life as a forensic scientist at the Central City Police Department. He was struck by lightning as a young man, which put him in a coma for a few months, but the accident had 'no observable repercussions.' He married his high school sweetheart Iris West, and the couple had two children: twins, a boy and a girl.

Your mouth nearly salivates at the possibilities two little words have brought forth. You could kidnap his children when they are young, raise them as your own. You could kill his pregnant wife. You could frame him for murder, ostracize him from society. You could simply go back and reveal his identity to the world, and let the natural order take its course. With your creative mind and genius level intellect, the opportunities to ruin Barry Allen are endless.

But then what?

He will hate you even more and will want revenge. Or, worse, he will go back in time himself and work to prevent your plans from taking place. What's the point? No, you need to do something more, something destructive to stop the Flash before he can grow to ruin your life. Yes, you need to stop him before he becomes the Flash, and then there is no possible way for him to retaliate.

You are going to kill Barry Allen as a child.

It sounds cold-hearted and awful, but it is for the greater good. You will kill Barry before he can grow to become your enemy. Before he can ruin your life. Young Barry will die for the sins of his future self. It is a fair and just punishment.

You decide to kill him when he is eleven. It's old enough that he's had some time to live, and his family and friends will have plenty of good and happy memories of him. But it's before he becomes a teenager, before he can be rude and angry and full of confusing feelings about the world. You're almost doing his parents a favor. They can treasure memories of their sweet and wonderful boy, and never have to see his attitude and behavior change. He will die a perfect child in the recollections of those who knew him. It is better than he deserves.

You tell no one of your plans, but somehow, the Flash is there to intercept you when you go back to the soon to be fateful night in 2000. The two of you fight in the Allen's once tidy living room, circling a screaming Nora Allen as you try unsuccessfully to reach young Barry. You hear Henry Allen scream for his son to run as he attempts to pass the yellow and red blurs to reach his distressed wife. Then, you are foiled again. Flash knocks his father out of the way and grabs young Barry, speeding off to who knows where. He has won again.

Rage worse than you have ever experienced fills your soul. You can't even kill a stupid, defenseless child because an old-timer in a red jumpsuit will always be there to stop you. In your livid haze, you run passed the unconscious Henry into the Allen's kitchen, and grab a knife. Nora pleads with you for mercy. As if you would show the creator of your greatest enemy _mercy_. You stab her savagely through the heart. She has his eyes, and you wish you could stay to watch the light leave them, but the Flash will be back soon, and you know when you've been beaten.

That's when tragedy really strikes. You've wasted too much energy on this useless plot for revenge. Your connection to the Speed Force has been cut, and your punishment is to remain banished at the time of your greatest failure. You cannot go home.

If you thought you were angry before, the fury that envelopes your entire being now is endless. Now, though, it's mostly directed at yourself. You finally bit off more than you could chew, and these are the consequences. You wish you'd never heard the name Barry Allen.

The first thing you need to do is develop a plan to get home. It is in completing the first task that you figure out and complete your second task: find a new identity. Everyone knows the names of Harrison Wells and Tess Morgan from your time. They are remembered in the science and history books with names like Einstein, Newton and Da Vinci. Building the particle accelerator changed the world, but you have no intention of waiting until 2020 for that to happen.

You kill the couple as they are driving home one night on a lonely country road, and take over Harrison Wells' likeness. You bury his bones in the woods on the side of the road; no one will ever search for them, because to the world at large he is technically still alive. You are a genius with knowledge and technology from the future, and it is easy to keep up appearances professionally. Emotionally is harder, but you pull it off. People close to Harrison make excuses for you, say that Tess's death changed you, and now you're harder, colder, and more focused on work than ever. You take advantage of their pity, and no one ever suspects a thing.

When you aren't working to develop STAR labs and the particle accelerator, you spy on Barry. In an outcome you hadn't planned or perceived, but are nonetheless pleased with, Henry Allen was arrested for his wife's murder and is now in jail. Barry has gone to live with a family friend, a police detective by the name of Joe West, and his daughter, Iris. You watch from afar as Barry works to adjust to life without his parents. You read the police reports, and have hacked into his therapist's files. Barry continues to blame his mother's murder on a yellow blur, claiming his father's innocence. No one believes him. You can't help but smile at Barry's stubborn belief in what in this time is thought to be impossible.

Young Barry Allen is an enigma to you. He is nothing like the hero you have come to know and hate. He's gentle and caring, and the death of his mother makes him quiet for a time. He has terrible nightmares that make him scream out in terror and cry for his parents. He's very intelligent, and always does well in school. Science is by far his favorite subject. But the things you find most puzzling is Barry's lack of athletic ability. The kid is scrawny and clumsy, and not fast at all. But Joe stills signs him up for soccer and basketball and baseball because Iris plays, and Barry seems to enjoy himself.

It amazes you how invested you become in Barry's life. You blame it on worry for the future you are planning and the fact that he's your key home, but it's more than that. When he and Iris get in a car crash when they're sixteen and end up in the hospital, you go surreptitiously check on him, even though Gideon has already told you that the future is the same. Watching Barry interact and get along with the Wests make you smile. And you're irrationally pleased when Barry graduates from high school as valedictorian and gets a full-ride to CCU.

You stop checking up on Barry as much when he gets to college. Of course, you check with Gideon almost every day to make sure that the future is unchanged, but you leave Barry alone. He's in college, an adult, and you are becoming very busy with the development of STAR labs and the construction of the particle accelerator. But sometimes you check on him, almost as a stress reliever. He's the reason you're doing all of this, and there are times you need a reminder. And he's so _normal_ , studying in the library, going to parties, rushing to and from his part-time job at the local coffee shop. You almost feel bad that you're going to disrupt his happy existence.

Almost.

You haven't forgotten the sins of the past, nor the reason why you're stuck here in this unevolved and mundane time in the first place.

You watch as Barry graduates from college, watch as he starts his new job with the Central City Police. Everything is on track, and you are so close to being finished. The most ironic part about all of this is that Barry Allen is a huge fan of Harrison Wells. He's read your biography, studied your research, and you know he'll plan on being at the ceremony to turn on the particle accelerator.

So, the night the accelerator goes online, you hire the kid who steals Iris' laptop. You need Barry out of there. The explosion, and the consequential lightning from the storm it generates, has been programmed to search out Barry's DNA signature. It won't do to have him around lots a people when that happens.

And happen it does. It couldn't have work out more perfectly. Everything goes exactly the way you planned. There were some injuries, some deaths, but that was expected. And the people of Central City hate you, but some of them also pity you. They think your life's work, all your hopes and dreams, have been shattered. And the whole wheelchair gig you've come up with doesn't hurt either.

You wait three weeks to go to the hospital and convince Joe to let you take Barry. His foster father is wary and distrustful, but even Joe knows that the doctors are completely baffled by Barry. If Joe wants Barry to live, he'll need to do something more. Joe says yes, not that it really matters. You would've taken Barry either way, this just makes the proceedings much easier.

Barry gets many visitors while he sleeps at STAR labs, but it's Iris who visits the most. She is distraught by Barry's accident, and comes almost every day, reading him books, reminiscing about their childhood, and praying that he will wake up.

Caitlin and Cisco are the only ones who remain at STAR labs with you after the explosion, and both help you care for comatose Barry. Cisco isn't very interested in his case, but Caitlin is enthralled. She can't wrap her mind around Barry's new regeneration capabilities, and goes on long tangents about redesigning replacement organs, making a new kind of prosthesis for missing limbs, and even curing cancer. That is, when she's not overcome by depression due to the death of her fiancé. You do feel a little guilty about that one.

It's so odd, at night when everyone else has gone and you sit alone with Barry. You think about what you would have given fifteen years ago to have the Flash in such a position of weakness, completely at your mercy. Now, you change his IVs, refill his oxygen tanks, check his urine output, all because you need him. The tables have most certainly turned.

There are days when you stare at his face and must work very hard to stop yourself from killing him. He's your enemy, your greatest rival, and if you didn't care so much about getting home you could just shred his heart and let it be finished forever. There are other days though, where you feel almost…guilty about what you have done. He still just a kid, and he looks so heartbreakingly _young_ laying there, waiting to wake up. This Barry has done nothing to hurt you. He's not even the Flash yet. He hasn't grown into the man you hate.

When he wakes up, you're relieved. You knew he would, but waiting on it was getting old, fast. You want to do tests, then guide him through a regimented training schedule in order to put him at maximum speed at fast as possible. It doesn't really surprise you when he puts those plans to the wayside, but you're still annoyed. It also doesn't surprise you when he begins stopping crimes and saving people with his new powers, but you're still angry. It's happening all over again, and you can't stop it.

Instead, you go with it. And Barry Allen impresses you. Every week he gets faster, developing new skills as he hones his abilities. Sometimes he's stupid, and many times he's reckless, but he gets the job done. And it's better than you thought it could be. You've watched Barry Allen for fifteen years, studied him and looked out for him. But you've never really known him, and the kid isn't what you expected.

He smiles all the time, and laughs even more than he smiles. Even though he has super-speed, he's late often, but his bashful grin and All-American boy routine get him out of trouble. He's funny, too. The first time he makes you laugh, it stops you short. He's intelligent, curious, and interesting to be around. You like him. If he hadn't been your enemy, you could have been great friends.

But it's more than that. You worry for his safety, and not just because you need his abilities. You appreciate the way he looks to you to answer his questions and help him make sense of the world. You take pride in his accomplishments, help him when he's in danger, and hope for great things in his future.

You love Barry Allen.

You're certainly not _in_ love with him. You're old enough to be his father. But that's the thing. You understand what Joe and Henry feel when they look on him with pride and hope. And from a certain point of view, you suppose, it makes sense. You are the Flash's creator, his father in a roundabout way. You are the reason for his existence, and though no one can know, you privately take the credit that you deserve.

Then he finds out. Finds out you planned the explosion. You stole nine months of his life. You killed his mother. And staring at you through the glass of your prison are the eyes you remember from fifteen years ago, glaring at you with disdain and hatred. All of the feelings of rage you've been bottling up since that fateful day in 2000 come back in a rush, and when you tell Barry that you hate him, it is the truth. But when you say that you love him, that you're proud of what he has done, it is also the truth. He doesn't like that, doesn't want to hear it now. He screams at you furiously and the hate doesn't leave his eyes, and you come to a terrible realization. You have created your own worst enemy.


End file.
